“Unemployment at 4-Year Low as U.S. Hiring Gains Steam” headlined the New York Times last Friday as I sat down with the makers of American Winter, a documentary that premiers tonight on HBO. The statistics suggest employment’s up and joblessness is down but watch American Winter and you get a mountain of reasons to take a skeptical look at those numbers.

American Winter follows the personal stories of eight families struggling in the winter of 2011-12 in Portland. (You can watch my conversation with the Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Joe and Harry Gantz in full here, at GRITtv.) Oregon’s not the worst place for public services and these aren’t the worst stories in the land, but they are representative. After months without work, teetering on homelessness and hunger, several of the people in the film eventually find jobs, but the jobs pay less (in one case, a man’s wage drops from $22 to $12/hour), the employment is part time, and at least one worker (a trained medical technician) has to start gathering scrap metal to make ends half-way meet. And that is just what’s happening beneath the headlines.

The fact is, the same Department of Labor surveys that show that the economy’s been adding jobs, also show an increase in part-time work, an increase in people holding multiple jobs, and only the slightest uptick in pay.

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Economics reporter Catherine Rampell reports that “Compared with December 2007, when the recession officially began, there are 5.8 million fewer Americans working full time. In that same period, there has been an increase of 2.8 million working part time.” The share of workers with part-time jobs has risen from 16.9 to 19.2 percent, and so has the proportion that would rather be working more.

If employment were truly up, labor force participation should be headed in the same direction, right? Wrong. The proportion of the adult population officially employed stands unchanged, at a dismal low of 58.6 percent. Here’s a graph from Bloomberg.

Are more people simply holding more jobs? The figures suggest so – in February, for example, the number of multiple jobholders was up by 340,000 to 7.26 million – more than the Department’s much ballyhooed number of 236,000 jobs created. How many of the new jobs were second or third ones? And how do we arrive at those unemployment numbers anyway? The Labor Department reports that 130,000 people left the labor force during February. That is, they are no longer counted as unemployed, thus shrinking the pool.

So neither the job creation, nor the unemployment numbers are as cheering as they first appear. You can slog through the analysis that contradicts the headlines, or you can watch AMERICAN WINTER for a check on reality.

As the Emmy® Award-winning filmmakers Joe and Harry Gantz warn — with stimulus spending behind us, and with $80 billion in federal sequester cuts ahead, the human consequences of cuts to social services, the decline of the middle class, and the fracturing of the American Dream have only just begun to show. Premiering tonight, American Winter airs all month on HBO. If you’d like to help the Gantz brothers distribute this film as part of a movement for change, you can, at Kickstarter.

Laura is a best-selling author and broadcaster. After many years in public and commercial radio, she founded The Laura Flanders Show / GRITtv in 2008 to serve as an online channel for in depth conversations with forward-thinking people from the worlds of politics, economics, business and the arts. A primetime, daily broadcast, GRITtv with Laura Flanders aired for three years on Free Speech TV before moving to KCET/Linktv and teleSUR, as a weekly program. Flanders is a contributing writer to The Nation and Yes! magazine. She is also the author of six books including the New York Times best-seller, BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical Species (Verso, 2004) and Blue GRIT: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians (Penguin Press, 2007). The Laura Flanders Show aired nationally on Air America Radio (2004-2008) before which she was the founding host of Your Call, on public radio, KALW, and CounterSpin, the nationally-syndicated radio program from the media watch group FAIR.

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